Australian Public Intellectual [API] Network

Liberating Tokyo

By Katarina Konkoly, Wollongong: Five Islands Press, 2004, 32 pages, paperback, $9.95. Reviewed by Stephen Lawrence in the April 2005 issue.

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The title suggests that Konkoly may be attempting to free us from constrictive urban paradigms -- to depict and reframe the metropolis -- transforming our existence and our sensibilities. The sassy superhero girl on the cover, a liberating force, looks like she is going to enact this for us.

However, it is misleading. Like the feline, East Asian eyes that loom behind the young girl, dominating and appropriating her persona, we do not get what we might expect. Hints of city life do adorn the collection, and the 'Tokyo girl' appears in the first poem, but its themes are rooted in a more mature sensibility and sexuality.

The collection is temporally structured. We progress through time, in reverse, spinning back at an accelerating pace into the past -- and the book closes with two pieces set in the present day. So those who dip randomly into the collection -- as many readers do --will find themselves, like Billy Pilgrim, flung back and forth in time. One does not have to follow the poems consecutively, but the poet reveals deeper structures and accumulated meaning if one does take the 'chronological' path.

The opening poem, '2015 AD', challenges readers, and particularly men, to face and accept the narrator's sexuality: 'I dare you, paint my eyes'. This tone risks being not as much sassy as somewhat plaintive, and also a bit overeager.

It begins with a parade of the speaker's fantasy heroics. Then comes the line, 'My feminine identity betrays itself, however'. It is too prosaic to be a good line of poetry, and the poem seems to fall over itself to get to its sexy bits.

When it gets there, it stays there -- and much of the rest of the collection concerns ripe or fluid relationships, expressed in the persistent imagery of fruit and various kinds of human liquid and excretions. Indeed, most of the possibilities are manifest: sweat, mucus, 'flesh tissue, scented dreams', semen of which women 'spit / or swallow // the seed' and 'clotted syrupy afterbirth'.

Breast milk is invoked several times: 'wisdom suckled like sap', 'he would drink from my nipples' and women's pendulous, middle-aged breasts 'burdened / with the weight of summer'.

Nor is the vegetable world exempt. Fruit is everywhere, 'pulpy and seductive': plums flow, spices and sweat blend, 'rosemary tang' is crushed and swamped in oil, red wine stains 'dribbled on my paps'.

This gendered approach does not exclude or abhor the male presence. However, at times the poetic voice prefers her men submissive or neutered: there is 'No sword in the hand of David'.

But Konkoly does not have a separatist agenda. A man's eyes 'sizzle in the candlelight', and their sexuality is irresistible. Men are to be dared, goaded or challenged to deserve sexual encounters with the poetess. They identify each others' intentions: 'You're no kitten, he grinned, / recognising his own kind'. ('Fox 1476')

It is not exclusively a 'women's collection', but the Goddess makes its inevitable appearance, in 'Changing leaves 1821' -- not to mention the invocation of Aphrodite and the 'nocturnal diva' ('Gurukmen Rewoken 1997'). And in response to 'Ut-napishtim's wife 2004 BC', in which

she blames her husband
for this god's curse
her interminable illness

life

I offer this response on behalf of Ut-napishtim's husband:

you give her everything
and she still blames you
for her incessant complaint

boredom.

Konkoly is a fine poet, and writes with sharp observation ('the cheek bones of a balcony') and pert humour ('in a jungle, a woman needs a four-wheel drive').

I sought more development in some of the poems. 'Tiamat to her sister 1400' presents as a linear meditation, rather than showing any real progress or growth: it ends as it begins. It is a very agreeable piece, but trundles along the runway without ever quite taking off. Its subject is a special kind of intimacy: 'If she's thirsty, I am too' and 'There is no imagining life without her'. However, the reader may feel unnecessarily alienated by the choice of the third person rather than the second, as we might have expected in this tale of entwined sisterhood. But like much of her poetry, when it works it works very well: 'Her fingers clench in dream, her fist ripens'.

Around the middle of the collection, in the 1950s, the topic of the second world war surfaces. And one very fine poem from this section is the disturbing 'Home with the Holocaust 1959', about a witness to mass murder unable to shake the images of corpses from his memory. The recollections hibernate until domestic moments unexpectedly revive them -- for example, watching home movies of his 'kids gambling [surely 'gambolling'] in the nude under the sprinkler'. Seeing his daughter falling off the trampoline and breaking her wrist shockingly merges with his vision of the carcasses of Holocaust victims. The Jewish Holocaust is a much-tilled field, but Konkoly manages to bring something fresh and real to the subject.

The collection's coda, 'Winter parklands', like many of Konkoly's poems, is dense and satisfying:

Bark rough with the
Affection of a steely beard.

On the back cover, we are vividly told that Konkoly's poems 'read like scratches down a lover's back'. More, I suggest, the best of them zing like a nail popping a mole on its way down.

Liberating Tokyo is an enjoyable and rewarding first collection, and does not outstay its welcome for one moment.

Citation

Stephen Lawrence. 'Review: Liberating Tokyo by Katarina Konkoly' [online]. Network Review of Books (Perth, Australian Public Intellectual Network), April 2005. Availability: <please cite the web address here> ISSN 1833-0932. [accessed 19 June 2013].

Back Cover Blurb

'As a geisha,

I have done many things'.

A chameleon perching on the future and the history of desire, Konkoly puckishly flutes of the vagaries of ancient mythology to the romance and brutality of the 20th century. Her poems read like scratches down a lover's back, stinging, sensual and entrancing.

'Brain behind the landscape, he rides

an exoskeleton of concrete, flesh and steel.

The city is his flower garden'.

Visitors' Responses

Thank you for your delightful review, Stephen. Your offering to the eternal dialogue between husband and wife was charming and insightful. I am very grateful. Regards, K.
P.S. If any readers would like a copy, please email me by going to http://spinach7.com/network/katarina_konkoly. Cheers!

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Reviewed by Paul A Pickering in the June 2005 issue.

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NRB April 2005

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